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Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Hipness has been an indelible part of America's intellectual and cultural landscape since the 1940s. But the question What is hip? remains a kind of cultural koan, equally intriguing and elusive.
In Dig, Phil Ford argues that while hipsters have always used clothing, hairstyle, gesture, and slang to mark their distance from consensus culture, music has consistently been the primary means of resistance, the royal road to hip. Hipness suggests a particular kind of alienation from society--alienation due not to any specific political wrong but to something more radical, a clash of perception and consciousness. From the vantage of hipness, the dominant culture constitutes a system bent on excluding creativity, self-awareness, and self-expression. The hipster's project is thus to define himself against this system, to resist being stamped in its uniform, squarish mold. Ford explores radio shows, films, novels, poems, essays, jokes, and political manifestos, but argues that music more than any other form of expression has shaped the alienated hipster's identity. Indeed, for many avant-garde subcultures music is their raison d'etre. Hip intellectuals conceived of sound itself as a way of challenging meaning--that which is cognitive and abstract, timeless and placeless--with experience--that which is embodied, concrete and anchored in place and time. Through Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," Ken Nordine's "Sound Museum," Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," and a range of other illuminating examples, Ford shows why and how music came to be at the center of hipness.
Shedding new light on an enigmatic concept, Dig is essential reading for students and scholars of popular music and culture, as well as anyone fascinated by the counterculture movement of the mid-twentieth-century.
Publication of this book was supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In Dig, Phil Ford argues that while hipsters have always used clothing, hairstyle, gesture, and slang to mark their distance from consensus culture, music has consistently been the primary means of resistance, the royal road to hip. Hipness suggests a particular kind of alienation from society--alienation due not to any specific political wrong but to something more radical, a clash of perception and consciousness. From the vantage of hipness, the dominant culture constitutes a system bent on excluding creativity, self-awareness, and self-expression. The hipster's project is thus to define himself against this system, to resist being stamped in its uniform, squarish mold. Ford explores radio shows, films, novels, poems, essays, jokes, and political manifestos, but argues that music more than any other form of expression has shaped the alienated hipster's identity. Indeed, for many avant-garde subcultures music is their raison d'etre. Hip intellectuals conceived of sound itself as a way of challenging meaning--that which is cognitive and abstract, timeless and placeless--with experience--that which is embodied, concrete and anchored in place and time. Through Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," Ken Nordine's "Sound Museum," Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," and a range of other illuminating examples, Ford shows why and how music came to be at the center of hipness.
Shedding new light on an enigmatic concept, Dig is essential reading for students and scholars of popular music and culture, as well as anyone fascinated by the counterculture movement of the mid-twentieth-century.
Publication of this book was supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- GenresMusic
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 6, 2025
I'm almost embarrassed that it has taken me this long to read this - I have known about it for years, it has been on my radar the whole time, but I never felt compelled to actually dive in. But I had to develop a genuine obsession with the history of the counterculture, do enough research to begin to have genuine questions of my own before I realized that this book was being cited in papers I was reading!!!
Did not disappoint at all - I have only read about 3 of the sections, and still plan to at least skim the other ones. So far the best analysis of what "hipness" is, and provides the best explanation for the flaws behind believing in co-option theory, an idea I have seen occur again and again and am starting to internalize. Most importantly though, for me personally, is the way that the book actually offers up a positive way forward! I'm sick and tired of books that only diagnose, usually in a negative way, and fail to try to build anything.
The synthesis at the end here was genuinely blowing my mind with the different connections I was able to make with my own personal experiences and beliefs regarding how art should be interacted with. The framework of magical hermenuetics as a way to recoup meaning in the world, in the face of postmodernism, as a way to recoup freedom and play and your own life...it just all resonated so hard in far more ways than I anticipated. Indispensable resource for the research I'm doing, even outside of the initial topic I was looking for. Genuinely life changing experience reading this. Loved it so much.
Did not disappoint at all - I have only read about 3 of the sections, and still plan to at least skim the other ones. So far the best analysis of what "hipness" is, and provides the best explanation for the flaws behind believing in co-option theory, an idea I have seen occur again and again and am starting to internalize. Most importantly though, for me personally, is the way that the book actually offers up a positive way forward! I'm sick and tired of books that only diagnose, usually in a negative way, and fail to try to build anything.
The synthesis at the end here was genuinely blowing my mind with the different connections I was able to make with my own personal experiences and beliefs regarding how art should be interacted with. The framework of magical hermenuetics as a way to recoup meaning in the world, in the face of postmodernism, as a way to recoup freedom and play and your own life...it just all resonated so hard in far more ways than I anticipated. Indispensable resource for the research I'm doing, even outside of the initial topic I was looking for. Genuinely life changing experience reading this. Loved it so much.
April 15, 2024
Damn you Weird Studies guys and your magical ability to create enlightening and addictive CONTENT that fills my time with wonder and keeps me from doing all the other things I think to myself I should be doing! Why must your ideas be so sticky? Your voices (whether heard or read) so entrancing and informative? Why do you both have to be so damn good at what you do?!
BTW - Only four written reviews of this book seems like an absolute crime.
Let's consider the whole book minus the last chapter (for a very good reason I will explain in a bit). For most of the book, Phil - and I hope it's OK that I call him by his first name but after listening to him on so many of his podcasts at this point it would feel odd personally to refer to him as Mr. Ford - Phil does the amazingly complete job you would expect him to do in taking what seems like a narrow subject - the idea or concept or experience of hipness - and delving into its contours to better understand its many variations and nuances from the inside out. But of course, since this is being written by the erudite Mr. Ford (in that instance I suppose it seemed right to use his last name) this seldom remains merely a spirited and insightful retelling of a history of hipness (roughly from the late 40's to the late 60's) nor does it remain only within Phil's chosen art form of music (poetry, prose, art, theater and other forms are more than covered) but also spins with an energy that continually reaches out to other philosophies, thinkers, disciplines, and conceptual frameworks across the centuries. I suppose I could go into detail about what is included in this book, but that seems less important than how it makes you feel - excited, inspired, entertained, and illuminated. Additionally, rather than being the normal tiring experience of "corroborating facts," the footnotes to his references are fountains of further knowledge and amusing asides, and I found my future reading list growing longer and longer as each marvelous page went by.
And if the book would have ended at the end of his penultimate chapter I would have found myself delighted and satisfied.
But then, Phil does as Phil does, and he took everything that came in the previous pages, every thought and seemingly idle digression, bundled it all up, and using a very-respected-by-his-peers but almost-completely-forgotten-by-everyone-else-now musician from the time - John Benson Brooks - takes the book from philosophical-historical overview to someplace completely magical and IN THIS MOMENT NOW (exactly practicing in this manner everything the hip sensibility has taught us for the last however many pages). By circling around Brooks' lost work Avant Slant along with discussing the working practice and artistic-magical-occult beliefs of Brooks, Phil not only takes us through a quick history of magical thought (a known personal interest of his) but also details a theory of "amateur practice" that can be instituted in each of our lives. Our attention to "personal signification" and "objects with saturation value" can enliven our experience in ways that everyday rationality is unable to, not that the latter is bad per se, but that life becomes so much richer and more dense with attention to and inclusion of the former.
Phil's example of listening to a stranger who is an "amateur" cellist (as an example) working their way through a classical piece as opposed to listening to a professional play is key. And it hit a very personal note with me that resonated deeply. The point Phil makes is that listening to an "amateur" stranger playing the piece "not perfectly" I might be very aware of all the mistakes they make. This experience as a listener might not be fulfilling. However, for the person who has been practicing this piece and is totally in the moment of playing it, the experience might be transcendent and transformative. That person's first hand experience is not my experience, and the better value of the whole experience should be found in the player's person. What's more - and this is really where it hit home for me - if I happened to be friends with this "amateur" player, and we knew each other for years, years in which we had experienced each other's trials and tribulations as we each attempted to practice and perfect our art, then this experience for me would suddenly be much different. In addition to the player's experience of being within the art moment, I too would be transported there through my knowledge of my friend and my sympathetic experiencing of the performance through their lens of being. Their wrong notes or timing would be meaningless next to my appreciation of their effort and joy in playing the piece. Any artist who has had a long time friend who is also an artist, where you have shared new works back and forth, even if only "amateur" works, knows this feeling through and through. Might you be the most "objective" judge of this friend's art? Who knows? Who cares? The much larger, more special, and indeed more important aspect is that you get to experience their art through your relationship to them and everything you know and have known about them. What a richer and much more full engagement that truly is. And the lesson here when looked at from the other side is that perhaps the best we can do with our lives and energies is to each find some artistic practice that we can work at, for this may be the truest way to experience experience.
To sum up, I will now be boring and predictable for anyone that bothers to regularly read my reviews... If you are not listening to the Weird Studies podcast and/or reading the books by Phil Ford and J.F. Martel, you are truly missing out on two of the great thinkers and creators of not only The Weird, but of the wider world of art, philosophy, literature, music, and straight up consciousness. You've been warned. Again.
BTW - Only four written reviews of this book seems like an absolute crime.
Let's consider the whole book minus the last chapter (for a very good reason I will explain in a bit). For most of the book, Phil - and I hope it's OK that I call him by his first name but after listening to him on so many of his podcasts at this point it would feel odd personally to refer to him as Mr. Ford - Phil does the amazingly complete job you would expect him to do in taking what seems like a narrow subject - the idea or concept or experience of hipness - and delving into its contours to better understand its many variations and nuances from the inside out. But of course, since this is being written by the erudite Mr. Ford (in that instance I suppose it seemed right to use his last name) this seldom remains merely a spirited and insightful retelling of a history of hipness (roughly from the late 40's to the late 60's) nor does it remain only within Phil's chosen art form of music (poetry, prose, art, theater and other forms are more than covered) but also spins with an energy that continually reaches out to other philosophies, thinkers, disciplines, and conceptual frameworks across the centuries. I suppose I could go into detail about what is included in this book, but that seems less important than how it makes you feel - excited, inspired, entertained, and illuminated. Additionally, rather than being the normal tiring experience of "corroborating facts," the footnotes to his references are fountains of further knowledge and amusing asides, and I found my future reading list growing longer and longer as each marvelous page went by.
And if the book would have ended at the end of his penultimate chapter I would have found myself delighted and satisfied.
But then, Phil does as Phil does, and he took everything that came in the previous pages, every thought and seemingly idle digression, bundled it all up, and using a very-respected-by-his-peers but almost-completely-forgotten-by-everyone-else-now musician from the time - John Benson Brooks - takes the book from philosophical-historical overview to someplace completely magical and IN THIS MOMENT NOW (exactly practicing in this manner everything the hip sensibility has taught us for the last however many pages). By circling around Brooks' lost work Avant Slant along with discussing the working practice and artistic-magical-occult beliefs of Brooks, Phil not only takes us through a quick history of magical thought (a known personal interest of his) but also details a theory of "amateur practice" that can be instituted in each of our lives. Our attention to "personal signification" and "objects with saturation value" can enliven our experience in ways that everyday rationality is unable to, not that the latter is bad per se, but that life becomes so much richer and more dense with attention to and inclusion of the former.
Phil's example of listening to a stranger who is an "amateur" cellist (as an example) working their way through a classical piece as opposed to listening to a professional play is key. And it hit a very personal note with me that resonated deeply. The point Phil makes is that listening to an "amateur" stranger playing the piece "not perfectly" I might be very aware of all the mistakes they make. This experience as a listener might not be fulfilling. However, for the person who has been practicing this piece and is totally in the moment of playing it, the experience might be transcendent and transformative. That person's first hand experience is not my experience, and the better value of the whole experience should be found in the player's person. What's more - and this is really where it hit home for me - if I happened to be friends with this "amateur" player, and we knew each other for years, years in which we had experienced each other's trials and tribulations as we each attempted to practice and perfect our art, then this experience for me would suddenly be much different. In addition to the player's experience of being within the art moment, I too would be transported there through my knowledge of my friend and my sympathetic experiencing of the performance through their lens of being. Their wrong notes or timing would be meaningless next to my appreciation of their effort and joy in playing the piece. Any artist who has had a long time friend who is also an artist, where you have shared new works back and forth, even if only "amateur" works, knows this feeling through and through. Might you be the most "objective" judge of this friend's art? Who knows? Who cares? The much larger, more special, and indeed more important aspect is that you get to experience their art through your relationship to them and everything you know and have known about them. What a richer and much more full engagement that truly is. And the lesson here when looked at from the other side is that perhaps the best we can do with our lives and energies is to each find some artistic practice that we can work at, for this may be the truest way to experience experience.
To sum up, I will now be boring and predictable for anyone that bothers to regularly read my reviews... If you are not listening to the Weird Studies podcast and/or reading the books by Phil Ford and J.F. Martel, you are truly missing out on two of the great thinkers and creators of not only The Weird, but of the wider world of art, philosophy, literature, music, and straight up consciousness. You've been warned. Again.
January 11, 2024
A masterpiece from one of the contemporary masters of the weird and esoteric. Thank you for your service Phil.
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August 6, 2014This is my review of the book as it appears on DigBoston.com:
http://digboston.com/boston-arts-thea...
http://digboston.com/boston-arts-thea...
May 3, 2014
The research and writing are both top shelf, although it's pretty challenging. My full review will appear in _Notes_ (2015).
January 23, 2016
I dug it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews